As someone once described to me, if you have a lot of money, the world's great cities, London, NYC, LA, Hong Kong are your playgrounds. Living, working, and playing within a walking distance or transit-friendly distance is strongly becoming an aspiration for those who have the skills or money to afford it.
If you make $300-400K/year in New York City, you can afford to live a little. Midtown or Chelsea apartment. Nice restaurants. Drinks in bars. $7 lattes.
This is exactly it for me. I don't live to work, I work to live and I want to have interesting, dense, urban things as near to me as I can manage. My salary isn't as high as some around here but I still pulled off buying a cute, compact house smack in the middle of Seattle near 24-hour transit service and minutes to everything I want to do. That's after moving from the suburbs of Texas where anything besides a 7-11 or a Cici's Pizza were at least a 15-minute drive (and you could forget going via transit).
Humans are social creatures and we want to be around other people. That's a generalization that usually holds true. Some people do want to live in a rural setting, with acres of land separating them from their neighbors. A coworker of mine does that and is quite happy with it. There just happen to be more of us, apparently, who want the urban environment.
If you make $300-400K/year in New York City, you can afford to live a little. Midtown or Chelsea apartment. Nice restaurants. Drinks in bars. $7 lattes.